I really like how you used 'birth' as a verb. You don't usually come across that and I thought it was pretty unique! The overall piece seemed to be pretty melancholic and it all flowed nicely. Really cool work!

If you haven't read "Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock" than...I don't even know what, XD. The first line "I have heard the Siren's song" is *so* resonant of "I have heard the mermaid's singing each to each..." that it would be almost a total and utter shame if you hadn't been inspired by it. In fact, it's so famous that if you just go to google and type in the search "poetry "I have heard the..."" it will come up as the first thing found. One of the biggest thing about being a poet is branching out and reading the greats, and T. S. Eliot should definitley be on that list from just seeing the blatant similarity there. Sorry, I'm just a total English nerd, haha.

In fact, okay, just read the poem the entire way through, and it is almost an impossibility to me that you haven't read T. S. Eliot, because the last stanza is EXTREMELY similar to "Let us go now you and I..." from Eliot's "Love Song...", so major mad props for the Eliot references for sure, his poetry can be mega tough.

Overall there are a lot of great things going on in this poem, the biggest being the flow. It's flowing perfectly, there is only one like "I will not look back though" that stuck out to me-maybe get rid of the "though" and you'd be good, since there's such strength in the speaker's lines and "though" is a word that accompanies a sort of "shrugging off" of something, but I don't think the speaker means to have those connotations, I want them to be more concrete and say, "I will not look back" as more of a singular definite statement.

Otherwise, great narrative voice, that's the biggest highlight here. It flows because the voice flows. The way they speak, like "I am no longer in a place; / places are in me." is fantastically said and well placed with rhythm and line breaking. I like the images sprinkled throughout as well, like "Highways become flat streets" and so on, though at the same time when you think about it, when is a highway *not* a flat street? But then going further to pain "then dirt roads" made it work.

I like that entire tie of just wandering and not being able to find a real place but carrying the places with you-that's a good message and I think you conveyed it in a successful and creative way. There isn't the serene and eerie sadness of "Love Song", of course, but you've captured something here with that inclusion of the reader, and I liked that a lot.

Though I found the scene and your narration captivating, I did feel a little disappointed in the (loss?)/absence of rhythm. It's not stodgy or badly worded in any places, but the straightforwardness of the sounds is not what I expected, from the title. And that second line, although it is vivid, it suffers from being too much for the eye to process. Even the commas don't truly help, they just cut it into chunks. The essence of that sentence is 'the clay has been shattered', and though I love adjectives just as much as anybody, I feel that sentence's composition (can sentences be possessive? ha this one is now!) is much too complex. I would definitely consider enjambment here, or even separate lines or parenthesis. Just something to disect it without relying on commas. I find using too many clauses in one go absolutely rinses away the most important part of my sentence, and with that I will be quiet now. I did enjoy this, but there is room to improve the phonetic aspect in my opinion.

From the title "Wanderlust" to the final verse, the poem only becomes more beautiful.

You employ lovely imagery in this piece. "The sound births an ache" and "I am no longer in a place/Places are in me" are my two favorites. One rarely encounters "birth" as a verb, and your use of it here adds a deeper flavor to the verse and the pain you feel. The latter image in particular is wonderfully evocative of wanderlust.

I enjoyed your allusions to Greek mythology: the Siren's song, the journey or Odyssey, and in the seventh stanza, an Orpheus leading his lover out of Hades who breaks character and does not look back. They tied the piece together thematically very well.

My only suggestions to improve the piece would be to eliminate the capitalization of letters at the beginning of every line, mostly because it looks jarring (to me), and consider making your word choice stronger in some stanzas. In particular, "one that hurts much worse than leaving" feels like a bit of a let-down, word-wise, after the beautiful line that precedes it. And I am slightly curious about those two verses that jut out dramatically onto the page-what is the purpose in their length?

Finally, thank you for your solid review on my piece, "Aubade". Such reviews are rare on FictionPress, and I appreciate you taking the time to seriously evaluate my piece and to offer critique.

I rather enjoyed this poem. The imagery you used was very vivid. I especially liked the second line about breaking the cast of your future, and the line that read, "I am no longer in a place./Places are in me." They both displayed a theme of becoming freed of constraints, to me.

I did think it could have flowed a little better. Some of your lines are overly long, and could be shortened or turned into multiple lines.

I like this. The first thing that came to mind for me was a feeling of wanting to spend forever with someone. Alrhough you have no destination, you have each other and thats all that matters. Like it doesn't matter where you end up in the end just as long as you their with that person. FREE-SPIRITED.

Wow. You've been waiting quite a while for this review, haven't you? :)

Form- I usually dislike poems with lone lines, but this one is an exception. The length of the lines makes the poem seem like one unbroken steam of thoughts and feelings. The way you split up the poem into separate stanzas helps the reader get a clearer idea of what you're talking about. The spaces are well placed.

Descriptions/Images- Imagery isn't the primary focus of this poem, but what descriptions I do see and interesting and unique. I particularly liked the image of shattering sun-dried tan clay. Stating that it bears your future only makes it more profound, especially when you say "but it doesn't bother me." I also liked the phrase "Whispers, carried like leaves on wind." It made me picture the breath of a god being carried around the world.

Enjoyment- I definitely enjoyed reading this piece. It was a fresh, original piece and keeps the reader interested by providing new ideas with each stanza. It didn't feel like it dragged on.

Other- The beginning of this poem was wonderful. I was drawn in as soon as I read the first line. It felt like there was an entire life, an entire story, an entire person contained in that line alone. Very potent. You grab the reader's attention immediately.

First, thank you for the review on my poem. Second, I really like this it inspires thought and I can really relate to it as I too always feel the tug to move (even if I am stuck here for two more years)